After entering into an agreement that provides a homeless woman and her young daughter with a job and a place to live, they find themselves in a fight for their lives with a dangerous man with a haunted past.

*BASED ON A TRUE STORY

SYNOPSIS:

Set in rural Belarus months before the collapse of the Soviet Union, NINA KAMENEV and her two-year-old daughter KARINA are homeless. With her alcoholic mother MARIA living with an abusive boyfriend, she is left with no choice but to enter into a “Life Support Agreement” with VIKTOR KARPOLOV, a gentle and seemingly innocuous man in his seventies.

The Agreement stipulates that Nina will serve as Viktor’s live-in caregiver until he dies; after which she will receive his house as payment. Her tasks involve cooking, cleaning and administering Viktor’s daily injection of nitroglycerine to treat a heart condition that will kill him without proper maintenance.

Though initially pleasant and harmless, Viktor’s behavior becomes increasingly erratic and threatening; both to Nina and her young daughter, who she tries to keep out of harm’s way. As his abuse escalates from emotional to physical, flashbacks reveal that Viktor was a high-ranking member of Stalin’s Secret Police and engaged in unspeakable atrocities against Russian civilians that still haunt him.

Viktor unravels as he watches news reports of the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. and his abuse intensifies in its severity. Nina turns to her mother for help but with Maria locked in a perpetual cycle of vodka- soaked victimization, Nina realizes that only she can save herself and her daughter. And only she can break the pattern of abuse that has long inflicted generations of Kamenev women.

After Viktor physically injures Karina and nearly drowns Nina in her bathtub, she decides to put a stop to his torment. In one last climactic confrontation, Nina fights to end Viktor’s reign of terror...and secure a safe future for herself and her daughter.

NINA'S LULLABY